The critically acclaimed artist Stuart Davis (1892-1964) created a large and complex body of work spanning the decades that witnessed the ascendence of contemporary American art on the international stage. As an artist, writer, teacher, and political activist, Davis was unwavering in his desire to produce a truly modern American art, declaring that his pictures were not “abstract” because they were “pictures of concrete things, American things . . . things [that] are the most direct physical realities of our optical and motor experience.” This and similar theoretical statements drawn from the artist’s extensive writings (both private and published) often seem to conflict with the art he produced, given that his aesthetic path took him in the direction of abstraction, away from narrative content. To be sure, such aesthetic problems reside in the traditional debate about the relationship of form and content and here, in the case of Stuart, it may be argued that his ultimate solution was to merge form and content, thus making a unique and vital contribution to the advancement of American art.
Roots in Realism
Davis was born in Philadelphia to Edward and Helen Davis, both of whom had studied at The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. It was Davis’s father’s work as a newspaper illustrator that brought the youngster into contact with other press illustrators, among them John Sloan, William Glackens, and George Luks. Through his membership in the Philadelphia Charcoal Club (which he co-founded in 1893), Edward Davis met Robert Henri, who eventually became the unofficial leader of The Eight, an influential group (including Sloan, Glackens, and Luks) dedicated to painting gritty scenes of urban American life. Stuart Davis grew up in this milieu and, in 1909, after dropping out of high school, he followed Sloan’s advice and enrolled in the Henri Art School in Manhattan, commuting from Newark, New Jersey, where his family had moved. (The Davis family relocated frequently, a pattern that stemmed from the ebb and flow of Edward Davis’s employment.)
Under Henri’s tutelage Davis quickly attained technical skills and demonstrated his early talent in adopting the vigorous brushwork and urban realism advocated by Henri. Henri’s dictum that “art cannot be separated from life” was the touchstone of his teachings and it remained central to Davis’s thinking throughout his career. Perhaps most important was Henri’s rejection of the established rules of academic instruction and his replacement of them with new systems of colour theory and composition then arising. Davis, however, spurned the absolutism of systems, preferring to formulate his own ideas. Nevertheless, Henri’s teachings encouraged young artists to open themselves to a broad range of ideas, an attitude that stayed with Davis, as witnessed by his references to poets, musicians, and other artists as his art developed.
By 1910 Davis was occasionally exhibiting his paintings and an examination of his art of this period reveals his proficiency in adopting the style and subject matter of the Henri circle. At the same time, the young artist was carousing with fellow students in the African American saloons of Newark and Hoboken and exploring the rougher neighbourhoods of New York. These late nights gave birth to Davis’s abiding love for ragtime and jazz, the latter of which he believed was “the great American art expression.” However, these barroom excursions also set him the road to a lifetime of heavy drinking. After leaving Henri’s school in 1912, Davis took a job as an illustrator through Sloan’s auspices at The Masses, a socialist magazine that promulgated reform, not only through articles, but also through coarsely drawn images of the city’s poor that underscored social inequalities. Davis absorbed the bohemian, intellectual atmosphere of Greenwich Village, where the editorial offices were located. The drawings that he produced for The Masses correspond thematically with the urban realism endorsed by Henri, but by no means did they further or represent his artistic aims.
The Armory Show and Its Impact
Although Alfred Stieglitz had been actively promoting European modernism since opening his gallery on New York’s Fifth Avenue in 1905, there is no evidence that Davis visited the gallery, the exclusivity of which may have put him off. Instead, Davis’s primary introduction to European avant-garde art was the International Exhibition of Modern Art, now known as the Armory Show, that opened in New York in 1913. Organised by the newly formed Association of American Painters and Sculptors, the ambitious exhibition surveyed modern American and European art, displaying an estimated 1600 works. By all accounts the Armory Show was in today’s terms a “blockbuster.” Davis was represented by five watercolours, likely thanks to the fact that Glackens was the head of the American division. Davis’s works (and the American offerings as a whole), were overshadowed by the shock exerted on the public and critics by such paintings as Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), (1912, Philadelphia Museum of Art), a canvas that drew a barrage of hostile criticism in headlines across the country. Like many visitors to the show, Davis was overwhelmed by what he saw and described the experience as a revelation that called into question everything he had done to that point. Initially he found the art of Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Matisse especially resonant since he discovered in them the possibilities of new formal relationships and the expressionistic use of colour. Davis digested lessons from these European masters as witnessed by his experimentation with the physicality of pigment in the manner of Van Gogh, the Fauvist abandonment of local colour, and Gauguin’s flattening of pictorial space by means of colour.
Davis’s career advanced slowly. Having resigned from The Masses over an editorial dispute in 1916, he scratched out a meagre living providing illustrations for other periodicals. His paintings were displayed occasionally at the Whitney Studio Club and the Society of Independent Artists, gaining some critical attention, but negligible patronage. The Sheridan Square Gallery (New York) held his first solo exhibition of drawings and watercolours in 1917. The works (particularly Negro Saloon) garnered vituperative critical responses, one of which deemed his art degenerate. In the summer of 1915 the artist visited Gloucester, Massachusetts. Returning there annually until 1934, Davis often incorporated elements of the Gloucester environs in his art. He remained relatively untouched by World War I, having been rejected by the armed forces for medical reasons. Following a severe case of influenza, Davis closed the decade with a brief trip to Cuba in 1919, where it has been suggested that he and his friend Glenn Coleman produced very little in the way of art due to overindulgence in the island’s pleasures.
Embracing Cubism
Davis’s immediate responses to the European moderns were soon displaced by intense investigations of Cubism. Inspired by Cézanne, Picasso, Braque, and Léger, all of whom had been represented in the Armory Show, Davis embarked on a series of paintings featuring the packaging for tobacco and cigarette papers. Lucky Strike (1921, Museum of Modern Art, New York), for example, overtly recalls Cubist collages. Yet the layered, multi-media surfaces of true collage are absent since Davis maintained the integrity of the two-dimensional surface. Then, too, by flattening the tobacco wrapper, Davis capitalized on the geometric patterns thus revealed, forcing the composition to read in a new way that is itself abstract. The size of the painting (it is nearly three feet in height) dislocates the subject from its original context, thus compounding the abstract sensibility. Moreover, the imagery – so familiar to the American consumer – contains words, letters, and numbers that faithfully reproduce that of the packaging, mimicking the conventions of Cubist collage technique. Davis’s deviations from the original object in terms of scale, orientation, and dimension create a truly abstract image that declares itself “American” by virtue of its commercial origins and the vertical inscription “The American Tobacco Co” at the right. Such works achieve the artist’s objective which he thought paralleled the poetry of Walt Whitman, the beauty of which found its source in simple, direct, popular imagery that was democratic in its appeal. Davis’s visual references to brand names persisted throughout his career, an iconographic conceit that has linked him to the foundations of Pop Art.
Throughout the 1920s Davis continued to explore various aspects of Cubism. Such investigations ranged from a number of large table-top still-life paintings reminiscent of paintings by Braque and Gris, to the famed Egg Beater series in which the everyday object takes centre stage, manifesting in a set of shapes emanating from simultaneous viewpoints in a pattern of hard-edged, brightly coloured shapes calculated to represent the object from different points of view through time. The evolution of this now famous series can be tracked through numerous preparatory drawings that reveal the Davis’s carefully conceived creative process that cancels any notion of spontaneity.
Although he was consistently strapped for cash, Davis’s prospects within the artistic arena of New York improved. Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery opened in 1926 and in 1927 she mounted the first of many exhibitions featuring Davis’s work. His paintings were regularly included in other group exhibitions, but still failed to sell. With the aid of a monthly stipend from Juliana Force and Gertrude Whitney (the powers behind the Whitney Studio Club, and later the Whitney Museum) he managed to survive. Again, with financial help from Force, Davis sailed for France in 1928 in the company of Bessie Chosak with whom he was living and whom he would marry in France. Once in Paris, he threw himself into café life, enjoying the camaraderie of the large community of American artists in residence. The Jockey Club – a night spot owned by the American expatriate, artist, and musician Hilaire Hiler -- was a venue of preference and it was Hiler who introduced Davis to the music of Earl Hines (after whom Davis’s son would be named).
Davis had taken two of his Egg Beater paintings to Paris and received encouragement from Léger who approved of the direction Davis’s art was taking. Despite this, the works (primarily street scenes) that he executed in Paris and shortly thereafter display a more delicate, linear (albeit Cubist) manner relying on simplified planar forms and reduced colour and tonal intensity.
Davis returned to New York in July 1929, buoyed by the belief that American art could hold its own in the contest with its European counterparts.
Political Activism in the Service of Art and Artists
The Great Depression, generated by the Wall Street crash of October 1929, not only crushed the world economy, but also dashed the hopes of American artists who were facing an already deflated art market. Davis and his artist colleagues were reduced to a hand-to-mouth existence, a condition that propelled him into a decade of political activism that began with joining the John Reed Club, an organization affiliated with Communism. Davis never joined the Communist Party, but he was instrumental in founding the Club’s subsidiary organization, the Unemployed Artists’ Group (later the Artists Union). Davis campaigned for collective action not only regarding wages for artists as workers, but also in connection with fighting fascism and advocating for the rights of workers in general. His articles for Art Front, the magazine of the Artists Union (published from 1934-37) and other print sources, illuminate his ideas.
For Davis the effects of the Depression were exacerbated by Bessie Davis’s unexpected death in 1932, the emotional shock of which prompted the artist to hospitalize himself briefly. His drinking went unabated (and unimpeded by Prohibition) and his long nights in speakeasys and clubs continued. Nevertheless, he retained his place as a prominent political and artistic presence, especially in his role as a founding member of the American Artists’ Congress in 1936, serving as its president in 1937.
Funds remained scarce. In 1930 he had agreed to what seems an extortionate arrangement with Halpert that would pay him $50 per week in exchange for each of his oils but one per annum. Halpert’s finances were poor and the weekly payments dried up, leading him to break his association with Halpert’s Downtown Gallery in 1936. The commission for a mural to decorate the men’s lounge at Radio City Music Hall kept him afloat temporarily. In the end, however, it was Roosevelt’s New Deal that offered hope; through the PWAP (Public Works of Art Project established in 1933) a small weekly sum was paid for works produced under its auspices. PWAP folded, however, and the FAP (Federal Arts Project) was put into place.
Davis benefitted from government relief especially under the FAP through which he received commissions for two important murals -- Swing Landscape (1938, Indiana University Art Museum) and Mural for Studio B, WNYC(1939). Swing Landscape is one of twelve murals commissioned for the public spaces at Brooklyn’s Williamsburg Housing Project, a low-income residential complex. Embedded within the raucous jumble of shapes and vibrant colours are echoes of Davis’s Gloucester paintings, yet none of the forms demanded recognition by the residents of the Williamsburg Houses since the purpose of the mural program (orchestrated by Burgoyne Diller) was to decorate the communal spaces with art that was enjoyable, unchallenging, relaxing, and democratic. In this breakthrough work, Davis annulled the traditional configuration of Cubism that depended on a central compositional mass and, instead, dispersed the shapes to give equal formal weight to all elements throughout the composition. As such, Swing Landscape is sometimes referred to in the context of Jackson’s Pollock’s all-over drip canvases with respect to the denial of space and the departure from a central focus. What is more, the mural’s title clearly refers to the improvisatory nature and open-ended arrangements of jazz. Davis unequivocally announced the correlation between his art and jazz in American Painting (1932), in which he incorporated “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing” – words from Duke Ellington’s hit song.
Davis’s financial worries and personal tragedy of the 1930s were offset by his achievements in the campaign for artists’ rights. He ended the decade with the monumental mural, History of Communication (destroyed), for the Hall of Communications at the New York World’s Fair of 1939. On the personal front, his relationship with Roselle Springer, whom he met in 1934, resulted in their marriage in 1938 – a union that would become increasingly fraught due to his drinking and overriding involvement with his art. Roselle gave birth to the couple’s only child, Earl, in 1952.
Recognition Gained
The Federal Art Project support that had been so vital for America’s artists ceased in 1939, signalling the country had shifted toward economic recovery. Still beset with financial problems, however, Davis accepted a teaching position at the New School of Social Research in 1940, remaining there for eleven years. Having resigned his membership in the Artists Congress (over its support of Stalinist ideology) and having completed the exhausting and time-consuming mural projects of the late 1930s, Davis returned to easel painting at full tilt.
Seemingly endowed with new creative power, Davis entered a period of re-evaluation during which he consolidated his theories, often looking to his earlier paintings and drawing on them for new compositions. Rather than seeing this mode of working as a sign of creative failing, it has been aptly compared to the musical convention of exploring variations on a single theme. This process yielded one of Davis’s most visually exciting paintings – Report From Rockport (1940, Metropolitan Museum of Art), which registers as a carnivalesque concoction of vibrantly coloured shapes that dance across the canvas. Based on his Town Square of 1925-26, Report From Rockportcontains vestiges of the earlier painting (for example, the basic composition, the gas pump, and the kiosk, and the garage), but it lives as a completely new and dynamic conception. Davis’s essentially self-reflexive approach yielded additional canvases that are some of his finest works. Subsequent paintings took on an increasingly conceptualised approach. Arboretum by Flashbulb (1942, Metropolitan Museum of Art) recreates Davis’s memory of an actual garden, yet it underscores his growing predisposition to erase representational elements from the image – a tendency that has been attributed to his interest in Gestalt theory and its emphasis on association. The upswing in the market for Davis’s art is revealed here in that both Report from Rockport and Arboretum by Flashbulb were purchased by the major collectors Edith and Milton Lowenthal in 1944 and 1945, respectively.
In 1941 Davis resumed relations with Halpert’s Downtown Gallery, which held his first solo exhibition in nine years in 1943. The show was a resounding success, with an opening party that included powerful museum curators, critics, artists (among them Mondrian), musicians (among them Duke Ellington and W.C. Handy), all of whom were treated to an evening of live jazz. Eight works were sold from the show and, with this, the fates had begun to favour Davis. In 1945 the Museum of Modern Art mounted an exhibition of more than fifty of his works, an event that confirmed Davis’s place within the art establishment. Now in his 50s, and despite suffering from what he called his “alcoholic miasmas” the artist, maintained a full schedule and remained remarkably productive. Finally, however, his physical condition deteriorated to the point that he gave up drinking in 1949.
Awards kept coming his way along with a stint as a guest instructor at Yale University, the inclusion of his works in major exhibitions, a solo exhibition at the American Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1952, and a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 1957.
An Outspoken Defender of American Modernism
Davis’s public profile as an artist reached its height in the 1950s, not only because of the growing esteem for his art, but also because he was frequently called on to participate in symposia and to give interviews on radio and television. Smart, articulate, and outspoken, Davis had consistently fought for the cause of modern art in America, voicing his loathing for the American Scene (Regionalist) painters (in a highly publicised row with Thomas Hart Benton) as well as his doubts about the value of the art of the Abstract Expressionists (comparing Pollock’s art to a “belch from the unconscious”).
Davis, however, did not entirely discount the value of the New York School (as the Abstract Expressionists came to be called); his principle objection was that their art emanated from the unconscious rather than from the exterior world of lived experience and observation. In fact, he apparently responded to Abstract Expressionism by increasing the scale of his canvases as if to challenge it in physical terms. This tactic is clear in Blips and Ifs (1963-64, Amon Carter Museum). Nearly six feet in height, it is one of the last great works of his career. Replete with characteristic “Davis” elements – the scrawled signature, brash colours, bold shapes, words (the jazz lingo found here in “Pad”), and letters – the painting declares its unquestionable authorship. The dominant letters “comp”, likely signifying “complete”, invite the possibility that the artist considered his long process of devising a personal, modern American artistic statement was, indeed, accomplished. He died in New York in an ambulance, siren blaring, in 1964.
